Am I Wrong For Not Making My Tween Do Extracurriculars?
Last week, I was leaning against my dented 2016 minivan waiting for my 11-year-old, Mia, outside the elementary school when another PTA mom wandered over to chat. She ticked off her son’s fall schedule: travel soccer three nights a week, weekly private art lessons, and Sunday morning coding club, all to “get a leg up on high school.” Then she turned to me and asked, “What’s Mia signed up for this semester?” I told her Mia was only doing homework and playing with the neighbor girl after school, and she blinked, like I’d said Mia was spending every afternoon napping on the couch. “Oh, that must be so nice for you,” she said, the subtext clear: you’re being lazy with her future.
I got in the car, Mia climbed in with a crumpled art worksheet in her backpack and a half-eaten bag of Goldfish crackers, and I started second-guessing all the way home. For months, comments like that have stacked up: My mom says I’m letting Mia waste her potential, her classroom teacher mentioned “extracurricular involvement builds social skills” at spring conferences, even my husband joked last month that we’re raising a homebody who’ll never put herself out there. I keep asking myself, am I actually the one in the wrong here?
A year and a half ago, I tried the whole scheduled thing. We signed Mia up for rec soccer, like all the other kids in her class. She spent every practice picking dandelions on the bench and crying after every game that her cleats gave her blisters and she’d rather be home drawing. Six weeks in, she begged us to let her quit. A few months later, we tried a group art class at the community center. She came home after the second week saying the teacher made everyone draw the same bowl of fruit when all she wanted to draw was hydras and mermaids, so she quit that too. I was fine with it at first. I’d rather she quit something she hates than force her to stick it out and end up resenting every activity. But the more comments I got, the more I started to wonder if I was just being too soft.
After the PTA moment, I sat down that night after Mia went to bed and made a list of everything she actually does in a week that no one counts as an extracurricular. It was longer than I expected. She negotiates turn-taking and game rules with the neighbor girl almost every afternoon, problem-solving when one wants to play fairy rescue and the other wants to play tag. She spends an hour every night drawing, writing backstories for her mythical characters, and staples them into little zines she gives away to family. She taught herself to bake chocolate chip cookies from a Pinterest recipe, adjusting the sugar count three times until it was exactly how she liked it. She goes to open swim at the community center every Friday with me, no lessons, just jumping off the diving board and playing mermaids in the shallow end. None of that shows up on a college application. None of it has a coach or a trophy or an end-of-semester recital. But all of it is stuff she chose, all on her own.
I’m not against extracurriculars. If your kid loves soccer or piano or coding, that’s amazing. I have friends whose kids thrive on the schedule, the teamwork, the challenge. But what I don’t get is why we act like every kid has to fit that mold, even if it makes them miserable. I saw a veteran elementary teacher write online once that most young kids get more social skill practice from unstructured play with neighborhood kids than they do from adult-led team sports, because the adults aren’t there to solve every little fight for them. That made sense to me. When Mia and her neighbor fight over a game, they work it out themselves, no coach stepping in to smooth things over. They learn how to compromise, how to apologize, how to change the plan when it’s not working. That’s a real skill, right?
I’ve worked out a small system that works for us, and if you’re in the same spot, you can steal it. First, we keep an interest shelf in Mia’s closet. If she says she wants to learn something new, I grab a free library book or a $10 kit from Walmart, no strings attached. When she got into knot tying last spring, that’s all we did. She practiced for two weeks, tied knots on all her backpack zippers, and moved on to the next thing. No pressure to stick with it, no money wasted on pricey classes if it’s just a passing fancy. Second, we cap scheduled activities at one per semester, and only if she asks for it. No signing her up for things just to check a box. Third, I have a go-to line for when people comment: “She’s working on things she cares about right now.” It’s polite, it shuts the conversation down, and I don’t have to defend my whole parenting philosophy to a stranger in the pickup line.
I still have the moments, of course. Last month at a family birthday, my cousin went on about her 11-year-old’s piano competition awards, and when Mia said she just draws, I got that same look, that same twist in my stomach. For 10 minutes after, I wondered if I was really dropping the ball. But that night, Mia pulled out a 10-page comic she’d been working on for a month, about a group of teen dragons that rescue lost hikers, and it had whole subplots and jokes and little details I never would have thought of at her age. That’s when I remember: this isn’t about what looks good on a paper right now. This is about what’s good for her, right now.
I still don’t know if I’m doing this perfectly. Mia might decide next year she wants to join volleyball or take art classes, or she might not. I don’t know what her college apps will look like in seven years, and honestly, I don’t think any of us can predict that right now. What I do know is that she comes home happy every day. She’s excited to work on her projects, she doesn’t fall asleep at the dinner table from exhaustion, and she still asks me to sit and color with her sometimes. That’s enough for me, for right now.
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